Shrader: I can ‘Throwback Thursday’ for years now

By Jennifer Shrader / Managing editor

Published: Thursday, April 24, 2014 at 06:21 PM.

There’s a trend on Facebook these days: Throwback Thursday. Who knows how or why it got started; my guess is it was someone with a scanner and a desire to embarrass former friends and relatives with old pictures.

Until just a few years ago, I thought there were no old pictures of me.

I was the second – and last – child. You know, the child who comes along when mom and dad have already grown tired of the camera and moved on with life and the challenges of raising two children. This was well before the day when people had portrait-quality cameras in their phones, even well before anyone carried a digital camera.

This was back in the day when you actually had to take the film to the store to be developed, and it took a lot longer than an hour.

There’s a trend on Facebook these days: Throwback Thursday. Who knows how or why it got started; my guess is it was someone with a scanner and a desire to embarrass former friends and relatives with old pictures.

Until just a few years ago, I thought there were no old pictures of me.

I was the second – and last – child. You know, the child who comes along when mom and dad have already grown tired of the camera and moved on with life and the challenges of raising two children. This was well before the day when people had portrait-quality cameras in their phones, even well before anyone carried a digital camera.

This was back in the day when you actually had to take the film to the store to be developed, and it took a lot longer than an hour.

Other than the stray picture here and there, school pictures and (dear God) dance recital pictures, I don’t remember having my photo taken much and I don’t remember a lot of photos, family or otherwise, hanging around the house. When my brother was a senior in high school, we had family pictures taken. I remember it being a huge deal.

As we got older, Dad did get a camera, but I mostly remember what could best be called “landscape” shots. Pictures of the house (which are priceless to me now after it sold in 2005) and pictures of family vacation destinations. Lots of pictures of Sherman, our cat.

In 2008, I went home for a family funeral and discovered the truth. My mom was in the middle of a project she had created, sorting through literally hundreds of family pictures from when I was too small to remember them being taken. She was creating a “pile” each for my brother and I so we’d each have our own photographic memories of our childhood.

What had happened was, Mom and Dad spent much of their early marriage and our childhoods taking plenty of photos, but they were all developed onto slides. Slides, apparently, were cheaper to develop back then, although ironically the opposite is true now. The slides stayed in their boxes for years and years and years, until my mother got the wild hair one day and decided to get them developed and get them to us.

And there it all was. My entire childhood, some I remember hearing about and some I don’t. I’m in a crib with enough metal on it to never pass any sort of child safety inspection these days, same with a high chair. There’s the swingset that was taken out by the tornado in 1974, recovered from a field by Dad and used for years and years after, albeit with a few pieces and parts missing.

There’s tons of pictures of my brother and I in our usual spot: in bean bag chairs or with blankets, in front of the one family television. There’s pictures of us with my great uncle in Michigan, pictures I didn’t even know existed, along with a lot of others I didn’t know about, either.

It’s hard to pick a favorite.

I like the one of me in a bonnet sitting next to the flower garden in the front yard. It proves that not only did my parents once have a garden, I also once was cute.

I like the series of photos my mom saved from my dance recital days, although Mom got worried when I snatched them up immediately to take back with me.

“Don’t throw those away, those were expensive!” she said.

“I’m not throwing them away, I’m just making sure they don’t wind up framed on the mantle one day without my knowledge!” I responded.

But I especially like another photo I didn’t know existed. I couldn’t have since I was only a crawling baby at the time it was taken.

It’s my dad, brother and I all spread out on the living room floor on a blanket, but unlike later years, we’re not watching television. My dad has a book open and he’s reading it to us and showing us pictures.

I didn’t know it was possible to miss a day you can’t even remember, but I do.

Jennifer Shrader is the managing editor of The Free Press; her column appears in this space every Friday. You can reach her at 252-559-1079 or at Jennifer.Shrader@Kinston.com. Follow her on Twitter at jenjshrader.